ProspectSoft’s Growing Business Reports

You may well remember a series of Growing Business Special Reports that ProspectSoft released and ran a number of workshops on. These workshops focused on getting the most out of your marketing and sales activities and ultimately how all of this activity could be recorded and automated with a CRM system.

The information contained within these reports is both informative and useable, with the ideas still completely relevant to all businesses. You can download the full report below completely free of charge but we have also given our own overview of the report entitled “Boosting Lead Generation” which, as the name suggests looks at ways in which more sales enquires or leads can be gained by, amongst other things, boosting response rates for marketing activities.

Boosting Lead Generation from ProsectSoft CRM – An HBP Overview

The Boosting Lead Generation report is based off of ProspectSoft’s own research into marketing carried out by themselves, their customers and their partners, as well as from consultation with business and marketing gurus and a £50,000 investment in improving lead generation.

All of the information that was gathered has been used to create a practical guide for small and medium sized businesses who are seeking to improve both short-term response rates from their marketing activities as well as those looking for ideas for longer term plans.

The key areas covered in this report that will help to boost lead generation are:

• Consolidate

Review and plan your marketing activities

• Innovate

Find ways to do things differently

• Analyse

Assess what is working for your business and what isn’t

• Iterate

Make small steps to achieve something big

• Orchestrate

Once you know what works, do more of it

• Automate

Maximise efficiency by utilizing your CRM system

Consolidate

This is the most logical place to start and is simply a case of looking at your business and asking – where are we now? Before any progression can be made it is important to take stock of your current situation and work out some basic figures.

How many leads are you generating each month?

What activities are being carried out each month that generate leads?

How successful is each campaign? What response rate do you get from each one?

Once you know what you are currently doing you can begin to plan by looking at what you want to achieve and what you think you need to do to achieve it.

Innovate

Every business will need to approach innovation in a different way. It will depend very much on what you are doing already as well as what your competitors are doing and what your customers expect. There is no end to innovation but it should also not result in the change of all of your marketing on a whim - trial new ideas and see if there opportunities out there to exploit.

Some ideas for new marketing approaches include:

• Offer a “Carrot”, such as a free gift or incentive, to increase direct responses

• Work on a winning message by writing brief, attractive, benefit-orientated headings

• Improve your targeting by segregating your audience and tailoring your message

• Try new mediums of marketing such as email marketing, fax-shots, advertising, newsletters or seminars

• Make sure your web presence is strong by not just having a website but actively marketing it

Analyse

Providing measurable results allows for analysis and continuous improvement of everything you do. It is absolutely vital that you are about to look at which activities worked, which didn’t, what can be improved and then what you are going to continue working on.

The most basic analysis you need to carry out involves working out the cost of the campaign and how much money it made you. If you have a lengthy sales process then you may need to use some early performance indicators, such as number of enquiries or number of sales meetings, which can lead to some projections about your final sales.

Tracking response rates is also an important level of analysis to carry out as it can always be improved. If you response rate is at 4% from a nationwide campaign then breaking it down into geographical regions might actually show that you receive a 6% response in the north and 2% in the south – possibly allowing you to change the focus of your campaign to reach the higher response rate across the whole country.

When analysing response rates you may want to consider the following questions to see where elements can be improved:

• Is there a particular job title group that responded well?

• Is there a particular industry type or geographical region that performs better than others?

• How do existing customers respond compared to prospects?

With all of the information you gather from your analysis you can decide on the best approach for the future by doing more of what works, less of what doesn’t and work on the activities that need improvement.

Iterate

Iteratation is an important step towards boosting your sales generation. It involves constantly and consistently trying new ideas, tweaking each one and trying again.

No matter how good your marketing department is not everything you do will work, so you must ensure that you learn from the activities you carry out and improve them for next time. By removing the parts of campaigns that work poorly, or don’t work well at all, you can focus your campaigns further which will reduce their costs and improve their success rates.

Orchestrate

Orchestrating success means not leaving anything to chance. Once you know what works then it is important to make sure you keep doing it and don’t revert back to older, less successful, ways. If your new, stronger, more consistent message is working then make sure that everyone in your company is using that same message.

Make sure you orchestrate the whole of your business so that you apply the same winning principles in all areas.

Automate

This one is simple and, if you are reading this, probably something you are doing already with your ProspectSoft CRM system. All of the stages of this plan can be recorded and implemented with the assistance of your CRM.

If you would like to read more about these processes then you can download the full ProspectSoft CRM Boosting Lead Generation Report.